Dangerous 'Angels' retains its power and relevance in new era

It was a news report, Portland Playhouse artistic director Brian Weaver recalls, that got him thinking. After 15 years in decline, the news said, the rate of HIV infection in America was on the rise again.

"I had come to think of it as just a problem in Africa; that it was something we'd solved here," he says. "Obviously, we hadn't taken care of it, it had just slipped off the public's radar."

The realization that awareness of HIV and AIDS remains a pertinent and powerful subject put something else back on Weaver's radar: "Angels in America."

"That was one of the first plays I picked up and read as a young college student," Weaver says of Tony Kushner's early 1990s masterpiece. "The power of the language has always been in my head, and I still think it's some of the best writing ever in an American play."

Subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," Kushner's play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993, among numerous other awards. New York Times writer Frank Rich said of an early production in London: "'Angels in America' is the most extravagant and moving demonstration imaginable that even as the AIDS body count continues to rise, this tragedy has pushed some creative minds, many of them in the theater, to new and daring heights of imaginative expression."

Reaching for new heights of expression for his fast-rising theater company, Weaver is taking on the challenge of directing "Angels in America: Millennium Approaches," the first part of the two-part epic.

"Angels" will be the second production that Portland Playhouse has staged in the World Trade Center Theater downtown instead of its usual home in a converted Northeast Portland church. But though it was a zoning issue that caused the recent "Gem of the Ocean" to relocate, "Angels" has been planned for the larger theater all along, to accommodate its dramatic scale and technical demands.

Infused with outlandish dreams and hallucinations, including an angel that the script suggests should crash through the theater's ceiling, the play can be quite elaborate, but also can benefit from a lighter touch in staging. "Kushner asks for the perfect thing," Weaver says. "He just asks for magic. He asks you to surprise the audience."

Actor Wade McCollum, who portrays an AIDS patient named Prior Walter, praises Weaver for "making clear and beautiful choices about the magical-realist aspects," describing him as visionary as well as an actor's director. He's certainly chosen some powerful actors to work with. McCollum, who's thrilled Portland audiences over the years in shows from "Bat Boy" to "Cabaret" to "The Santaland Diaries," returns. Noah Jordan, who performed at Artists Rep a few years ago in "Assassins" and "Metamorphoses," plays Louis, Prior's fearful partner. The rest are Portland stalwarts: Lorraine Bahr, Gretchen Corbett, Berwick Haynes (recently of Portland Center Stage's hit "Oklahoma"), Chris Harder, Ebbe Roe Smith and Nikki Weaver (Brian's wife).

Set in 1985 in New York City, "Angels" weaves together wrenchingly intimate stories, that of Prior and Louis as they struggle with the harrowing physical and emotional ramifications of "the gay plague," and the dilemmas of a young Mormon lawyer grappling with his sexual identity, his wife's Valium addiction and the Faustian career opportunities offered by his unscrupulous mentor, Roy Cohn. The play's themes are multilayered: fear of death, pain of betrayal, the costs of living a lie, ugly machinations of political power and the corrosive effects of sexual frustration. And though the social/political context around AIDS and issues of gay life has shifted over the past two decades, the play still feels piercingly relevant.

"I've been deeply surprised by how dangerous it feels," McCollum says. "There are period things in it, but the core of it is people going through the dissolving of relationships and facing death. Of course it's going to be different because we live in a different world. ... But in terms of how we approach these issues as a society, there's a different kind of opening that allows us to do a different kind of work."